I’ve been thinking about nootropics recently, and whether or not they should be greeted as wonder drugs or the latest milestone on Silicon Valley’s road to dystopia.

In case you don’t spend all of your waking hours on Reddit sub-threads, nootropics are brain-enhancing supplements. Occasionally, they’re called smart drugs or cognitive enhancers. People take them to improve their memory, focus, motivation or attention without the hassle of getting a prescription or having to deal with the nasty side effects of drugs like Adderall.

Nootropics are (mostly) legal, (mostly) safe and easily available. They’re cheapest and best when you order them from online suppliers, but you can find some of them at Whole Foods.

They’re also fairly complicated — you should take a different combination, or “stack,” of supplements, depending on your goal.

From my own experience with them, I can say conclusively that it’s a lot easier for me to burn the midnight oil with better focus by taking a stack of bacopa, l-theanine, phenylpiracetam and choline.

Modafinil with krill oil seems to be popular for fighting sleep deprivation. If your life is all about long workouts, creatine can be taken in combination with rhodiola and CoQ10.

You get the point — a bit of research and experimentation is necessary. (I meant it about those Reddit sub-threads.)

Speaking of Reddit, it’s not surprising that nootropics are very popular in Silicon Valley.

They just make sense for groups of people who work long hours and are afraid of buying street drugs. With nootropics, you have the promise of higher performance, the complexity of a data set, and no risk of going to jail — what’s not to like?

I will admit to liking them and using them, but I can identify two major concerns. The first is the concern that they’ll give certain people an edge over others — a sort of neuro-enhanced inequality in addition to all of the other inequalities we already have.

This is true — up to a point, and it’s been going on for years.

I remember, for example, that during my senior spring in college, I was absolutely shattered by deadlines and thesis defenses and the general panic of not having read enough, seen enough or done enough before I was launched into the brutal, mind-numbing reality of the real world.

Many of my friends felt the same way, but there were a few blessed souls who seemed to cruise right along. They stacked up their honors, turned in all of their papers, and still had time for long lunches. I remember watching them in awe — it was clear that they had a secret.

Finally, about two months before graduation, I confronted a few of them about it.

“How are you making it?” I bleated. “I’m trying to get by on four hours of sleep a night and I’m dying.”

They glanced at each other sideways, and then down at the table.

Finally, one of them spoke: “Adderall. Of course.”

The others nodded immediately. “There’s no other way to get everything done.”

I wasn’t outraged, just envious — all of that time I’d lost! All of those extra books they’d been able to read, all of those movies they’d been able to see.

But later on, they told me that recreational Adderall, like nootropics, only works as well as its taker. Without the maturity to harness your extra energy, you’re just as likely to waste it.

What’s more concerning to me is that there are other underlying reasons for the supplements’ rising popularity.

Something you also see on all of those Internet threads is the fact that not everyone who’s taking nootropics is a 24-year-old genius on the verge of a product breakthrough.

There are a startling number of marginal workers and traumatized war veterans and people suffering from serious depression. So many of them are trying to refine their stacks not out of a sense of curiosity but desperation, because they recognize that four hours of sleep per night isn’t a temporary obstacle to be overcome but a permanent feature of their lives.

What would be better for them — and what I suspect would be better for so many of us — would be a society in which they had access to the basic components of a healthy life.

We haven’t built that society. And while nootropics have their benefits, solving this colossal failure isn’t one of them.

Caille Millner is an editorial writer and Datebook columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. She has worked at the paper since 2006. On the editorial board, she covers a wide range of topics including business, finance, technology, education and local politics. For Datebook, she writes a weekly column on culture.She is the recipient of the Scripps-Howard Foundation’s Walker Stone Award in Editorial Writing and the Society of Professional Journalists’ Editorial Writing Award.